Thursday
A Guardian article about birds and the afterlife has caught my attention since I had an experience similar to that described by the author. So did the poet Lucille Clifton.
Helen Harris reports that, after her husband died,
the birds started behaving strangely towards me. This was not my imagination; it really happened. On my daily walks, I was startled by how close they came to me – approaching, hopping alongside me and chirping. If there were a lot of them – and if there was no one else around – it felt as if they were accompanying me, maybe trying to convey something.
Harris at first dismissed the idea that this was a message from her husband. “When you are newly bereaved,” she writes, “it’s easy to grasp at any sign that your loved one might somehow still be there.” For his part, her husband had been “certain there was no afterlife and it was totally irrational of me to think that there might be.”
The sightings kept happening, however. Once a robin followed her home, and later, when she was hiking in the alps,
a young magpie appeared out of nowhere and perched on the banister beside me, making a tremendous fuss. He squawked and flapped his wings and bounced up and down, obviously beside himself. As he was less than two feet away from me, this was quite disconcerting.
Harris notes, “I still don’t know what was upsetting him but I do know that things like that never used to happen to me.”
Had I read this story before I had my own experience, I would have dismissed it as wish fulfillment: in her grief, Harris was just noticing things she had missed before. She even acknowledges this as a possible explanation, wondering whether she was just “paying more attention to the birds.” Nevertheless she concludes, “But I also think they sensed that there was something wrong with me – I was a wounded creature – and maybe they really were accompanying me.”
Various past civilizations, including Egyptian, Scandinavian, Hindu, and Native American, have regarded birds as messengers between this world and the next. Odin’s ravens, for instance, brought news of fallen warriors. My own experience involved an osprey.
A week after our son drowned, Julia and I were sitting in the churchyard gazing down at the river where it had happened. An osprey was sitting in a nearby tree, and while this itself was not unusual, it sat there for the full 30 minutes we were there, never leaving. I’d never before seen an osprey do this.
The following two Sundays the same thing happened: when we exited from church, there it would be. And although it was absent on the fourth Sunday, another bird (a mockingbird) had taken its place. Again the bird remained stationary for the full time we were there.
On the anniversary of the death, when we went to the riverside to remember Justin, an osprey flew overhead. I remember feeling disappointed that it didn’t perch on the tree but, at the very moment I had the thought, it circled back around before continuing its flight. I imagined it was reminding us that Justin was still present but that it was time to move on.
I don’t feel compelled to construct an alternate cosmology from such experiences. Enough to cite Hamlet on unexplained mysteries— “There is more in heaven or on earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio”—and shift my attention to other things. That being said, I now take note when others report similar experiences.
A reader from India, for instance, reported that, after his father died, a crow that had cawed incessantly outside the kitchen window–and that his mother would feed–suddenly disappeared. So did some stray dogs that had come waiting for his father to feed them. “It was as if they had come to guard my father and take him someplace else safely,” he wrote.
Here’s Clifton’s experience as her husband was dying of cancer:
as he was dying
a canticle of birds
hovered
watching through the glass
as if to catch
that final breath
and sing it where?
he died.
there was a shattering of wing
that sounded then did not sound,
and we stood in this silence
blackly some would say,
while through the windows,
as perhaps at other times,
the birds, if they had stayed,
could see us,
and i do not mean white here,
but as we are,
transparent women and transparent men.
We think we are buried inside out private tragedies, invisible to the rest of the world. “You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley, you’ve got to walk it by yourself,” goes the old spiritual. Yet Clifton assures us that, in some mysterious way, we are transparent, seen and understood by forces beyond our understanding.
